How-To: Import contacts into your Android smartphone

We’re continuing with our “back to basics” how-to series and this time we’ll take a moment to explain you how to import contacts to your Android smartphone. Some of the newer devices come with the built-in import functionality that allows you to move contacts from your old device via Bluetooth. If your phone doesn’t support this capability, here’s what you should do:

First of all, you must have a GMail account (obviously).

You need to connect your old phone to your computer and transfer contacts to Outlook or Outlook Express using some sort of PC suite software.

Start Google Contacts and import the file. While here, you can also try to “find duplicates” to merge some of the contacts or delete the ones you don’t need. Similarly, you can create groups which will also be visible on your Android smartphone.

There’s also an alternative way to do this. If you don’t have that many contacts, you can simply move all of them to your SIM card and then when it [SIM card] is in your Android smartphone, import them to the Contacts list.

Once you’re done with this, you may also want to pull social contacts too. To do that, you’ll need to install the Facebook and Twitter apps and select to import data from all contacts…

Complete newbie here (don’t even have the phone just yet). So, just be clear, the contacts MUST come from a Google / GMail account; there’s no way to have contacts without a link to Google? In other words, Google has access to the contacts in my phone??